Becoming a committer

Anyone can become a relax developer and obtain commit access to the relax repository.
The main criteria for selection by the relax developers is to show good judgement, competence in producing good patches, compliance with the coding and commit log conventions, comportment on the mailing lists, not producing too many bugs, only taking on challenges which can be handled, and the skill in judging your own abilities.
You will also need to have an understanding of the concepts of version control specifically those relating to Subversion.
The SVN book at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
contains all the version control information you will need.
After a number of patches have been submitted and accepted any of the relax developers can propose that you receive commit access.
If a number of developers agree while no one says no then commit access will be offered.

One area where coding ability can be demonstrated is within the relax test suite.
The addition of tests, especially those where the relax internal data structures of the relax data store are scrutinised, can be a good starting point for learning the structure of relax.
This is because the introduction of bugs has no effect on normal program execution.
The relax test suite is an ideal proving ground.

If skills in only certain areas of relax development, for example in creation of the documentation, an understanding of C but not python, an understanding of solely the code of the user interface, or an understanding of the code specific to a certain type of data analysis methodology, then partial commit access may be granted.
Although you will have the ability to make modifications to any part of the repository please make modifications only those areas for which you have permission.